No jobs for law graduates? They fare better than most

Is the oft-touted "glut" of law graduates real? The statistics suggest not.
Rob Homer

by
Carolyn Evans

At this time of year, many young people flood out of schools, colleges and universities and commence looking for their first full-time job.

The students graduating into today's economy have it tough – over the last few years the job prospects for graduates have declined, although they remain much better than they are for those that enter the workforce straight out of high school.

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The Council of Australian Law Deans this year undertook a comprehensive survey of all university law schools and asked them how many graduates completed last year with a degree that allows them to enter the legal profession (such as an LLB or JD).

With a 100 per cent response rate, the answer was 7,583. That is around half the 16,000 that is often cited.

Higher salaries

The second important step is to get a sense of how law students fare compared to other groups entering the workforce – a far more useful comparison for students making choices about what degree to study than saying that things were much better 10 years ago.

Law students do well compared to their peers in other disciplines. Law graduates have a higher rate of employment, a higher average starting salary and a higher life-time earnings premium than the average graduate.

Not all rosy

This is not to say that the outcome is rosy for all law graduates; some of them are unemployed, some have given up on jobs in law to pursue other options, and some have settled for a job in law that is less than ideal. It is only to say that this is the case in almost every discipline and that law graduates do better than most.

Parents who are urging their children away from law and into sciences should have a good, hard look at the data rather than the rhetoric on employability.

A final important step in helping to have an informed debate about law graduate numbers is to provide a much richer, more detailed analysis of where law graduates actually end up working.

Melbourne Law School has taken a step in this direction by this week releasing the results of surveys of the classes of 2013 and 2014. We have a detailed breakdown of the percentage of graduates in different types of employment and a long list of the various employers for whom they work.

The most recent survey of Melbourne Law School graduates shows particularly strong results with 98 per cent employment and 73 per cent of those employed working as a legal graduate (trainee, barrister, solicitor or judge's associate) and most of the rest in good graduate roles or employed in other legal roles.

We list more than 125 different employers from the legal and non-legal sectors who employed our students – showing the wide range of possibilities there are out there for law graduates.

We hope that by sharing the facts, students can make an informed choice about the study of law and that the legal profession can gain a better understanding of the place of law student employment in the wider context of the market for university graduates generally.

Carolyn Evans is chair of the Council of Australian Law Deans and Dean of Melbourne Law School